Are we all broken, are we all looking for ways to heal ourselves?

While processing my feelings over the last couple of years, feelings of loss and sadness and regret, knowing I needed to find a way to stop being so hard on myself, I began to think about this sense of being “broken”. It makes a useful metaphor to explain difficulties.

I wrote and wrote and through this discovered insights into my past, revisioning the past, reinterpreting events, realising how a others were struggling with their own pain – and the thought came – are we all broken? And if so – how can any of us hope to live positive lives, and have positive relationships, when we are carrying our wounds and scars with us into all our interactions with the world.

I believe in exploring myself, my past, my thoughts, my feelings, in order to understand myself. It isn’t easy, and recently it led me to one of my lowest points in recent years. This thought of being broken surfaced again, and I began to wonder if there could be a way to heal my sadness, my regret, the difficulties I have that can be traced back and explained by my childhood. I wondered, is there a way for these wounds to be healed that creates something positive, that doesn’t leave such damage, that results in beauty and strength and growth?

I recalled seeing a Japanese bowl repaired with gold – and this looked so beautiful. The history of the bowl was clearly there, nothing hidden, no pretense, but it had been mended “healed”. The gold itself was beautiful and the pattern it traced over the bowl.

I wondered if I could use this as a metaphor… but how to find or create the gold, could I replace old scars with new traceries of gold?

And so now, knowing I’ve been broken and mended the best way I could at the time, my search now is to find ways to explore my past, my personality, to acknowledge my weaknesses, the defences I’ve created for survival, and re-imagine these, rework these scars with lines of gold “kintsugi”.

Instead of trying to pretend there has been no damage, or to hide the repair, or make the repair invisible, better to honour the past, to own it, to recognise its effects, and reconstruct oneself with beauty and balance and belief in one’s intrinsic value.